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As Counsel, Thompson Walked Capital’s Fine Line

The Reagan administration was only a few months old when it faced a major test: Senators were calling for the head of the president’s new director of central intelligence, and no one knew if he would survive their investigation into his tangled past business dealings and questionable agency management.

But the White House’s worries were quickly set to rest by the man the Senate had chosen to get to the bottom of the matter, Fred D. Thompson. In July 1981, just one day into his job as special counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Thompson assured the White House that there was no “smoking gun,” documents show. He had yet to interview a single witness.

Based on Mr. Thompson’s subsequent investigation, the Senate declared the intelligence director, William J. Casey, “not unfit to serve.”

“He was looking to save Casey’s job,” said Irvin Nathan, who represented the committee’s Democratic minority. “His job was to get the matter off the table for the White House. He did it well, and he did it graciously.”

Next month, Mr. Thompson is expected to join the Republican race for president. While he is perhaps best known for playing the tough-minded District Attorney Arthur Branch on the NBC show “Law & Order,” it is his real-life role as an investigator of government wrongdoing that has become a central part of the political biography he hopes will propel him to the presidency.

But the public image of the impartial, “let the chips fall where they may” prosecutor that Mr. Thompson has cultivated masks a more nuanced reality.

As Mr. Thompson’s actions in the Casey inquiry illustrate, he sometimes straddled a fine line between investigating his targets and defending them. Dozens of interviews and records from two administrations reveal a lawyer who often struggled to balance the agenda of his party against his duty to pursue the truth aggressively and independently.

Over time, as Mr. Thompson traversed the highly politicized terrain of the Congressional investigations that built his off-screen career, he evolved from a man primarily cast as a defender of Republican interests to one whose fair-mindedness would win praise from Democrats and incur the wrath of the Republican leadership.

More than two decades later, Mr. Thompson led another inquiry aimed at the White House. Elected to the Senate in 1994, he was hand-picked by the Republican leadership to investigate Democratic fund-raising scandals involving President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Instead, Mr. Thompson infuriated conservative groups and many of his colleagues by widening the investigation to include Republican improprieties, even threatening to quit if forced to abandon his bipartisan goal.

In between, Mr. Thompson played a virtually unnoticed role as an informal adviser to his mentor, Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., Republican of Tennessee, during the storied Church Committee hearings into abuses by American intelligence agencies. His representation of a Tennessee parole board chairwoman in a 1977 lawsuit helped bring down a Democratic governor in a cash-for-clemency scandal — and kicked off his acting career, when he played himself in a movie about the case. As a senator, he led hearings that forced the Pentagon to acknowledge a gulf war-era friendly fire cover-up and wrote a two-volume report on government waste and abuse.

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Fred D. Thompson was chief counsel to Republicans on the Senate Watergate committee.Credit
George Tames/The New York Times

In a recent interview relatively devoid of the folksy patter for which he has become known on the stump, Mr. Thompson, 65, reflected on the “up close, classic education” he received over his investigative career, saying it had cemented his belief that government should not be given any more authority than it absolutely needs.

“Well, I think it gets back to Lord Acton’s admonition,” he said, referring to the 19th century British historian’s warning that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. “Too much power should not be in any one person’s hands, including the president of the United States.”

‘Dazzled to Be in Washington’

President Nixon was dismayed when he learned that Mr. Baker had chosen Mr. Thompson, a 30-year-old lawyer from Tennessee, as Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate committee. How, the president worried, would that “dumb as hell” rube match up to Samuel Dash, the esteemed Georgetown law professor hired by the committee’s Democratic majority to investigate the unfolding scandal?

“You’d think this guy would be so totally dazzled to be in Washington that he’d be lost,” Mr. Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, in February 1973.

Mr. Baker, the committee’s savvy and powerful Republican vice-chairman, knew better. A year earlier, Mr. Thompson had helped run his re-election campaign, impressing the senator with his loyalty and life story.

Raised in the small town of Lawrenceburg, Tenn., where his father sold used cars, Mr. Thompson married his pregnant girlfriend while in high school, then worked his way through college and Vanderbilt Law School. After graduation, he joined the law firm of his wife’s uncle and in 1969 had been appointed an assistant United States attorney in Nashville.

Mr. Thompson might have been a Washington neophyte, but as a former philosophy and political science major, he says, he had thought deeply about the dark side of human nature. “I was under no illusions about people’s propensity to do the wrong thing,” he said.

Still, despite evidence that the scandal had reached deep into the White House, Mr. Thompson was convinced that the president was being railroaded by a spiteful press, and that he could not have known about the burglary and bugging of Democratic headquarters or been involved in its cover-up.

A bulky 6 feet 5 inches, Mr. Thompson towered over his Democratic counterpart, and his molasses drawl played counterpoint to the staccato bursts of Mr. Dash, a New Jersey-born son of immigrants from Russia. Yet, differences aside, the men hit it off over their first lunch, at the Monocle on Capitol Hill.

In his book on the case, Mr. Dash recalled the Tennessean’s disarming manner. “You’ll have to take it easy on a poor backwoods lawyer just come up to the big city,” Mr. Thompson smiled, before promising that he did not see his job as protecting Republicans “any more than I’m sure you see yours as protecting Democrats.”

But as the hearings began, Mr. Dash grew increasingly convinced that Mr. Thompson, at Mr. Baker’s behest, was “relaying everything back to the White House,” recalled Mr. Dash’s widow, Sara.

In fact, Mr. Thompson did frequently confer with the White House counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt, according to the counsel’s notes and tapes of White House conversations in which Mr. Nixon and his aides alternatively praised Mr. Thompson’s efforts for the president and berated him as a “yes man for Dash.”

At one point, Mr. Buzhardt reported to the president that Mr. Thompson had told him that, with the hearings turning into a “political dogfight,” he recognized his partisan responsibilities and was “now willing to work with us” on a plan to deflect blame by investigating the Democrats’ 1972 campaign tactics.

“The White House saw him as an ally,” recalled Leonard Garment, Mr. Nixon’s former special counsel. “But he wasn’t sitting in our laps.”

On Capitol Hill, there are few, if any, clear-cut rules to keep politics out of investigations. Mr. Thompson said in the interview that as an aide to the committee’s Republican minority, his mandate was to do what the Democrats would not, and that included talking to the president’s lawyers and looking at the Democrats.

“The minority counsel’s, I think, proper role is to walk that line and to assist in carrying on the investigation, while at the same time making sure that it’s done in a fair manner,” he said.

Several of the committee’s Democratic lawyers said Mr. Thompson had walked that line appropriately. Mr. Dash’s assistant chief counsel, Terry Lenzner, said that if he had been in Mr. Thompson’s shoes, he would have consulted with the White House, too.

“But from my standpoint, he certainly wasn’t obstructing our inquiries,” said Mr. Lenzner, who now runs an investigations firm. “I found him willing to listen and open-minded.”

Mr. Dash remained distrustful. In May 1973, the recently fired White House counsel, John W. Dean III, approached Mr. Dash, offering a major break in the case, with one condition. Mr. Dean would reveal the president’s knowledge of a cover-up that included buying the silence of the Watergate burglars and, ultimately, Mr. Nixon’s use of federal agencies to punish political enemies. For his part, Mr. Dash agreed to keep the substance of their conversations from Mr. Thompson and Mr. Baker, lest they be slingshot back to a White House eager to cover its tracks and destroy Mr. Dean’s reputation.

It was not until June 16, days before Mr. Dean’s scheduled testimony, that Mr. Thompson finally got a crack at the star witness. To pre-empt Republican charges that Mr. Dean had been sprung on them, Mr. Dash scheduled a special Saturday session at which Mr. Thompson could question the former counsel in strict confidence. Mr. Dean recalled Mr. Dash’s instructions — give just the “bare bones” — but said he needed no coaching: “Fred Thompson’s role was to try to discredit me to protect Nixon.”

Indeed, the tapes show that Mr. Buzhardt was prepping Mr. Thompson to take Mr. Dean apart, marching him through hundreds of cross-examination questions “in most excruciating detail.”

In his book about Watergate, Mr. Thompson writes of questioning Mr. Dean about $4,850 that he had taken, though later repaid, from a White House slush fund to pay for his honeymoon.

What Mr. Thompson does not say, but the tapes show, is that the president’s men had fed him the information, and that he had reported straight back to Mr. Buzhardt.

“Thompson hinted that he had admitted it,” Alexander M. Haig, who had replaced Mr. Haldeman as chief of staff, told the president on June 18.

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DARK DAYS FOR REPUBLICANS: INVESTIGATING A PRESIDENCY Mr. Thompson, right, in 1973 with Republican members of the Senate Watergate committee, from left, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, Howard Baker of Tennessee and Edward J. Gurney of Florida.Credit
Mike Lien/The New York Times

Mr. Nixon was jubilant, and the honeymoon story was leaked to The New York Times. The two men also discussed Mr. Thompson’s account of Mr. Dean’s “rambling” and “not particularly effective performance.”

But Mr. Nixon wanted more, complaining that “that little boy Thompson” was not providing enough detail. Mr. Buzhardt reassured the president that Mr. Thompson was convinced of the White House version of events. “I got him believing,” he said.

Mr. Thompson’s conviction remained steadfast throughout Mr. Dean’s sensational public testimony, and even after one of his staff lawyers unearthed the bombshell of the secret White House taping system.

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In his book, Mr. Thompson acknowledges tipping Mr. Buzhardt off to the discovery. He said in the interview that he worried about leaks and did not want the White House to “do anything foolish.” Still, it would take him nearly a year to recognize that the tapes, far from proving Mr. Dean a liar, spelled the president’s downfall.

On April 30, 1974, after fighting the committee’s subpoenas, the White House released heavily edited transcripts of select conversations. Michael Madigan, Mr. Thompson’s deputy, recalled bringing a dog-eared copy to Mr. Thompson’s paper-strewn apartment. Filled with gaps corresponding to important dates and meetings, the transcripts nevertheless contained incriminating references by Mr. Nixon and his aides to money laundering, hush money and the like.

“I can remember it was late at night, and Fred saying, ‘Can you believe this can be happening at the White House?’ ” Mr. Madigan said.

Three months later, the Supreme Court ordered the White House to turn over the actual tapes, with their powerful evidence that Mr. Nixon had obstructed justice.

To Lowell P. Weicker, the committee Republican who had most actively pursued Mr. Nixon, Mr. Thompson’s late awakening was just that. From day one, he said, Mr. Thompson was the president’s “errand boy.”

“As matters changed and it became increasingly obvious that the White House was standing on quicksand, Thompson himself evolved,” he said. “But the measure of the man was in the early days of Watergate.”

Mr. Thompson said the president’s culpability became clear only “over a period of time,” in part because he had been overly focused on behind-the-scenes tactical wrangling.

“I took my president at his word,” he said. “And the things that later turned out were surprising, and disappointing.”

No ‘Fishin’ Expedition’

After Watergate, Mr. Thompson returned to private practice in Tennessee. He remained close to Mr. Baker. So when Senator Barry Goldwater and other leading Republicans began calling for the resignation of President Reagan’s intelligence director in the summer of 1981, Mr. Baker, by then the majority leader, turned to his protégé.

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BOTH SIDES OF THE AISLE Mr. Thompson with Senator John Glenn, during a 1997 fund-raising inquiry into Democrats and Republicans alike.Credit
Dennis Cook/Associated Press

The situation called for someone who could walk the political tightrope between the White House and Mr. Goldwater, the irascible chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Mr. Baker, who was supportive of Mr. Casey, privately persuaded his Senate colleague to offer Mr. Thompson the job of running the panel’s investigation. Before accepting, records show, Mr. Thompson consulted Fred F. Fielding, then as now the White House counsel.

“Most Republicans didn’t really want to go after Casey,” said Gary Schmitt, then an aide to one of the committee’s Democrats. “Thompson was a serious lawyer, and he was hired to make sure that the investigation didn’t run wild.”

The controversy had begun with Mr. Casey’s decision to put Max Hugel, a Reagan supporter lacking intelligence experience, in charge of covert operations. It escalated with a torrent of questions about Mr. Casey’s business dealings, involving lawsuits filed by disgruntled investors and accusations that he had been less than forthcoming about his finances during his confirmation hearings.

Mr. Thompson’s quick assurance that “there is no smoking gun” is related in a memorandum written by Mr. Fielding on July 28, 1981, the day after Mr. Thompson took the job. Mr. Fielding added that Mr. Thompson had “indicated that the matter might be resolved within 10 days,” according to the memorandum, obtained at the Reagan Library.

Mr. Thompson said that while he does not recall the conversation, “if Fred says it happened, then I’m sure it did.” As to how he was able to make such a snap judgment about an investigation he had yet to commence, Mr. Thompson replied, “Indeed,” before adding that it was “pretty obvious early on” that even the most serious financial allegations “didn’t amount to much.”

In any case, on July 29, after hearing testimony from Mr. Casey, Senator Goldwater announced that “based upon staff review to date,” the director should remain in office.

The committee would continue its investigation for four months before issuing its findings — that while Mr. Casey was at a minimum inattentive to detail in failing to report various business dealings during confirmation, the omissions did not warrant his dismissal — but the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House, had a clear, quick victory.

Victoria Toensing, who worked with Mr. Thompson on the inquiry and supports his candidacy, said he primarily saw his job as getting the various players to be “on the same page” so the director could “get back to the business of intelligence.” Still, she said, “Fred understood that you had to go through the process so that people would feel comfortable.”

Mr. Thompson allowed investigators to pursue all leads, she said, but kept a narrow focus. When Democrats wanted to look at years of Casey tax returns, for instance, he put his foot down. “I can remember him saying,” she said, mimicking his Southern accent, “ ‘We’re not gonna go on a fishin’ expedition.’ ”

Taking On Republicans

In the winter of 1997, less than three years after his election to the Senate, Mr. Thompson gathered his closest aides at AV Ristorante, a spaghetti joint blocks from Capitol Hill. He had been chosen to lead a Senate committee investigation into fund-raising scandals during President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, involving everything from Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers to illegal donations to the Democratic National Committee by Chinese nationals. The televised hearings, the talk went, could catapult the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-rising Republican star to the presidency.

But over dinner, Mr. Thompson told his aides that he was considering quitting the investigation, according to participants. He was taking hits both from Democrats, who did not believe that he meant his promise to examine fund-raising by both parties, and from Republicans who were beginning to worry that he did.

From on high, the majority leader, Senator Trent Lott, was trying to limit the investigation to the White House. From across the aisle, Senator John Glenn, the panel’s Democratic vice-chairman, was fighting to limit the investigatory budget. “He’s acting like the White House’s defense counsel,” Mr. Thompson fumed to an aide.

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More than 20 years after Watergate, a different image of Mr. Thompson was emerging — jousting with Republican leadership even as he leveled the same accusation at Mr. Glenn that had once been leveled at him.

For all the back-room maneuvering, the Watergate investigation was viewed as a model of bipartisanship. Mr. Thompson recognized, he said in the interview, that no finding of Democratic wrongdoing would be credible unless this investigation, too, was seen as fair. In Watergate, he had pressed to look beyond Mr. Nixon; now, he said, he would give Democrats a shot.

“I wasn’t trying to equalize things — I thought the heavy end of the stick, you know, ought to be reserved for Clinton, for sure,” he said. “But there was no way that I was going to shield any obvious problems that our side had.”

Ultimately, after receiving general assurances from Mr. Lott, Mr. Thompson decided against quitting. He did not want a public fight with his party, he said.

Aides say the senator had another motivation, partly a legacy of revelations of the Nixon campaign’s illegal use of campaign cash. He hoped the investigation would galvanize support for campaign finance reform stalled in Congress.

By that measure, the hearings were effective. The legislation passed, in 2001, and a number of Democratic fund-raisers eventually were convicted.

But many Republicans labeled the hearings a bust. They did not share Mr. Thompson’s zeal for campaign-finance reform. And they felt that in his quest for bipartisanship, Mr. Thompson had taken his eye off the prime target: the Clinton administration.

For the party leadership, Mr. Thompson’s fatal lack of focus was crystallized by his decision to let Mr. Glenn subpoena the former Republican chairman, Haley Barbour, to testify about a Hong Kong businessman’s $2.1 million loan guarantee to a group with close ties to the Republican Party.

Mr. Thompson even joined Democrats in grilling Mr. Barbour, who had testified that he had not known the money was foreign, even though he had discussed the loan with the businessman while in Hong Kong.

“When you are sitting on a boat in the Hong Kong harbor talking to a gentleman who is a citizen of Taiwan, that does raise certain other potential implications in terms of appearances,” Mr. Thompson noted at the hearing. “It’s an appearance business that we are both in, isn’t it?”

“That took guts,” said Alan Baron, the committee’s Democratic counsel.

“Initially, he was viewed as a hatchet man, but he ended up bending over in a way that refreshed me to try to be fair,” said Lanny Davis, the former White House special counsel. “He convinced those of us in the Clinton White House that it’s possible to be partisan and intellectually honest at the same time.”